Rebutting the 'best evidence' of the Majdanek 'gas chamber'

In April 1994, I asked for the anti-revisionists in the "alt.revisionism" newsgroup on the Internet to tell me what they considered to be the best evidence that the Nazis had a plan or policy to exterminate millions of Jews in homicidal gas chambers. Not only did no one respond substantively to this challenge, so far no one has even succeeded in producing evidence of a single homicidal gas chamber.

What I have received is a bunch of testimonies of uneven value (many of which don't mention Jews at all!), and a forgery or two. (See, for example, my rebuttal of a group challenge by anti-revisionists.)

Finally, one person, after many months, offered up a "gas chamber" at Majdanek, his best evidence for its existence being the Leuchter Report, which he had previously lambasted as being unreliable from front to back. This person combed through the Leuchter Report to find one point at which Leuchter wrote: "Although chamber No. 1 is operational for carbon monoxide, it is poorly vented and not operational for HCN." This, he claims, is proof of a Nazi gas chamber.

In order to use this passage from the Leuchter Report, this anti-revisionist was forced to skip over a previous section in which Leuchter wrote, in reference to this chamber 1: "This room, clearly, was not an execution chamber and meets none of the described criteria." He also managed somehow to skip over a passage three sentences after his "proof" sentence where Leuchter wrote: "Therefore it is the author's best engineering opinion that chambers No. 1 and No. 2 were never, and could not ever, be used as execution gas chambers. None of the facilities at Majdanek are suitable, or were used, for execution purposes". (emphasis in original)

A subsequent examination of this "gas chamber" (at Majdanek) by revisionist researcher David Cole turned up the fact that the pipes that Leuchter had thought lead into the "gas chamber" from outside the room, in actuality did not extend through the wall. In other words, these pipes had been put into place for no other reason that to make the room appear to be a "gas chamber." Therefore, while Leuchter was wrong in thinking that the room had piping for the introduction of carbon monoxide, he was correct in stating that the room was never a "gas chamber."

In summary, months after a challenge that should have been very simple to meet, if in fact the Holocaust extermination stories are correct, we see that those who most rabidly believe in the "gas chamber" stories have no substantive evidence to back up their claims. (For those of you who believe that testimonies are evidence, check out any of the many testimonies from people who claim to have been kidnapped by aliens and taken into flying saucers. For me, I'll wait until I see an operational flying saucer, thank you.)

In all fairness, it is not only the anti-revisionists in alt.revisionism who cannot produce a Nazi gas chamber. No one anywhere has ever produced a Nazi gas chamber. At the very least, this suggests that traditional extermination stories surrounding the Holocaust are exaggerated, and that there is a real need for thorough, impartial examination of Holocaust claims to determine what is factual and what is not. This, then, is the job of the revisionist historian.